Pluralsight Blogs

Windows Phone 7 Released to Manufacturing

jim-wilson — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 21:15:00 GMT

In case you haven't seen the announcement, Microsoft announced that Windows Phone 7 RTM'd today ...

... Looks like we're just about done with all of the speculation.

Sometime in the next couple of months, the WP7 phones will be on the market and we'll see how they compare to the iPhones and Androids of the world.

Pluralcast 23 : Visual Studio LightSwitch with Jay Schmelzer

david-starr — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 17:02:00 GMT

Listen to this episode! [41:23]

Have you been hearing the chatter about Visual Studio LightSwitch? It is a new technology from Microsoft targeted at quickly building line of business apps. And for a bit more sweetness, it builds tiered Silverlight apps for us! LightSwitch is currently in Beta 1, but seems destined for being it’s own version of Visual Studio.

In this discussion with Jay Schmelzer, we go a bit beyond the typical explanation of LightSwitch and discuss how it actually works under the covers. As Jay helps us understand, we can expect actual productivity gains using this technology and well designed code along the way. My impressions of LightSwitch after this discussion are fairly positive. I can definitely see myself using the technology on my next quickie forms-over-data application.

Jay Schmelzer

Jay Schmelzer is a Group Program Manager on the Visual Studio Team at Microsoft. Jay and his team are responsible for the Visual Studio design-time tools and runtime components used to build line of business applications. That includes the Visual Studio support for building Microsoft Office, SharePoint and Windows Azure solutions, Visual Studio LightSwitch, Visual Studio's data binding and data consumption experiences, as well as the application programmability and extensibility available in Visual Studio Tools for Applications. Prior to joining Microsoft, Jay was a partner with a leading consulting firm and specialized in the design and development of enterprise applications. Jay has authored several articles and books on application development and is a frequent speaker at application development conferences.

Show Links

I love robocopy's /MT option

jim-wilson — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 23:14:00 GMT

I realize that this isn't new news but I've been getting a lot of mileage from the robocopy /MT option available on Windows 7 and love it.

If you're not familiar with /MT it causes robocopy to do the copies using multi-threading. It's just an amazing time saver when doing network transfers or folder copies involving a lot of files.

To put it in Facebook term's "Jim likes robcopy's /MT option" :-)

Interacting with iPhone Platform Services

jim-wilson — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 19:47:00 GMT

Just released the latest module in my Pluralsight On-Demand training course, iPhone ASP.NET Fundamentals ...

Interacting with iPhone platform services

If your interested in mobile application development or web development, I hope you'll check it out.

Pluralcast 22 : How Pluralsight.com gets built with Keith Brown

david-starr — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 22:41:32 GMT

Listen to this episode! [31:30]

If you think ASP.NET Web Forms automatically results in boilerplate, procedural code, this show is for you. Turns out, there are some techniques we can apply to Web Forms (like a salve) that make them creamier and delicious. Keith tells us how Pluralsight.com gets built, along with the tools, techniques, patterns, and practices that the team uses.

Okay, okay, the team really boils down to Keith, Fritz, and me, but that’s not the point! The point is, there is some coolness under the covers, and this show peals them back.

- Dave Starr

Keith Brown

Keith is a co-founder of Pluralsight where he oversees the developer security curriculum, which has an impact across all of Pluralsight's course offerings. Keith spends most of his time researching security techniques and technologies, and has spent a decade teaching and developing course material for professional software developers. Keith is a contributing editor for MSDN Magazine, where he wrote the Security Briefs column for eight years. Keith regularly contributes feature articles to the magazine, while focusing his attention most recently on his blog.

iPhone Accessing the Visual Studio ASP.NET Development Server - Windows 7 Update

jim-wilson — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 21:52:00 GMT

About a year ago (tomorrow is 50 weeks to the day) I wrote a post Accessing the Visual Studio ASP.NET Development Server from iPhone that talked about debugging ASP.NET content targeting iPhone (and other mobile devices) using the old Microsoft Soap Toolkit 3.0 Trace Utility ... a utility so old that it was "retired" in April 2005.

I liked using that Trace Utility ... it was easy, lightweight, and it worked.

Well a day I have long been dreading has finally occurred...

Over this past weekend I swapped the hard-drive outta my laptop and replaced it with a solid state drive (SSD) ... I then installed Windows 7...

... Under Windows 7, the Soap Toolkit Trace Utility just doesn't seem to work. No errors ... but all connection attempts to the port the Trace Utility is listening on fail.

But all is not lost...

I searched around for another port forwarding solution. Although I found several for-pay solutions, I didn't want to go with a for-pay solution unless I had to because they tend to offer much more than I really need ... just needing simple port forwarding, I was pretty sure that a free solution was out there.

And then finally, I found "SPI Port Forward" ...

... I've only been using it for a few days but so far it's perfect. The utility is free, it just works, the program is small (~1mb download) and the resource consumption appears to be pretty low.

Using the same example as in the original post, to use SPI Port Forward to accept the device connections do the following

Set "Local port" to the port number the device will connect on, I usually use 8080 out of habit
Set "Remote host" to localhost
Set "Remote port" to the ASP.NET Dev Server Port
- Note: The picture below should show port 3804 (not 4937) for consistency with the original post
Click the "Activate" button to start accepting connections

So far, the SPI Port Forward utility is working perfectly ... I hope your experience is the same

BTW: Just like in the original post, this solution is not limited to connecting from iPhone; connections from Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, Windows Mobile, or pretty much any other computer will work as well.

Is iPhone the new Windows 3.1?

jim-wilson — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 16:20:00 GMT

Well ... maybe things aren't quite that bad but it does seem that the Apple of today is increasingly like the Microsoft of yesterday.

I think Apple provides incredibly innovative products but their business practices seem to have become increasingly harsh ... it can certainly give one the feeling that Apple has firmly displaced Microsoft as the reigning Evil Empire.

With that in mind, I couldn't help but enjoy the irony of an Apple "Genius" proposing a Windows 3.1-style fix for an iPhone 3GS in this ZD-Net Blog Apple really is becoming Microsoft...

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did

Software, “It’s not what we do”.

david-starr — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 12:12:24 GMT

I get to visit with a lot of developers in a lot of different organizations. Sometimes those developers work for software companies, sometimes they don’t. More often they do not. Most IT professionals don’t work for software companies, after all, and custom software development in these environments is considered an “enabling technology” rather than a “core competency”.

One thing I have heard expressed in those places is, “software development is not our core competency, therefore recommendations around professional development practices don’t apply to us.”

Good, lord. Really, people?

This is akin to a Boeing corporate attorney claiming that he need not be competent because Boeing makes airplanes.

I don’t know where this absurd line of reasoning comes from, but I know why it is tolerated. It is tolerated because we don’t have the formal structures to hold professionals accountable the way we might hold an electrician, plumber, or physician accountable to being merely competent. If you are reading this post you probably make 3X the salary of a plumber, yet are held to a lower degree of professional accountability for your work.

This is sad, but it doesn’t mean that we need to pick up the mantle of mediocrity available to us. We can hold ourselves accountable for professionalism no matter where we work.

If the organization we serve specializes in jellybeans, services, software widgets, or any other industry, we are hired to being our best game to the table. This is why they hire us, folks! We are supposed to know what we are doing, not making excuses for incompetence!

In summary, no matter what type of organization you work for:

Yes, you need to use source control.
Yes, you need to automate the build.
No, you shouldn’t be releasing the assemblies compiled on your machine.
Yes, you need to stop writing long methods and pay attention to code complexity.
Yes, you need to buy your developers the best tools available.
No, you don’t need to write your own logging framework.
Yes, you should be practicing test first development.
No, continuing to ship known defects is not acceptable.
Yes, you should understand who your customer is.

Kindle Adds WebKit Browser

jim-wilson — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 14:26:00 GMT

It seems like WebKit is rapidly becoming ubiquitous in the world of mobile devices.

As I posted yesterday, Blackberry devices, starting with the Torch, now have a WebKit-based browser. I just now saw an ad for the 3rd generation Kindle and among the list of features, it lists a WebKit browser. I haven't had a chance to work with the Kindle implementation yet but my expectations are pretty high.

There are, of course, going to be special considerations on a device like the Kindle. The E-Ink display's slow update rate will obviously limit the kinds of animations the device can display and the ultra-power efficient CPU probably won't allow performing processor intensive JavaScript operations ... but even with those caveats, the new Kindle is likely to be a pretty decent web client.

I'm a huge fan of the WebKit browser for a couple of reasons. For one, it's just a really good browser and provides solid standards support. It does a great job of providing a common base for the many browser implementations that use it, while still allowing individual implementation to add their own bells-and-whistles.

The beauty is that the additions are just that ... additions. The features that a particular implementation may add do not break standards.

And the implementation of WebKit itself is so rich that one can write incredibly powerful browser-based apps without deviating from the features common to all of the WebKit browsers. Also, because WebKit does such a nice job of following standards, I've found that the vast majority of content I write targeting WebKit also works well on the desktop FireFox browser.

It seems that we're rapidly approaching the world of a universal browser client ... with, of course, one key exception...

Neither Microsoft's mobile device browser nor their desktop IE browser are WebKit-based. The good news is that with each evolution of IE, it does a better job of supporting standards. We also know that Windows Phone is providing better browser standards support that Windows Mobile did but there's still some work to do there.

In any case, the world of mobile browser-based apps is getting brighter everyday ...

Software Craftsmanship on the Polymorphic Podcast

david-starr — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 17:11:58 GMT

I was recently honored to be a guest on Craig Shoemaker’s Polymorphic Podcast. Craig was one of the very first podcasters to focus on .NET and I remember listening to his show on my way to work many years ago. Another cool part for me is that I got to be a guest instead of being the host!

The interview is now live and available here.

We visited many of my favorite topics including:

How to sell Agile in your org
Scrum and ScrumBut
Code Craftsmanship
Agile in small teams
How to be an agile army of one
How my mom is the perfect complexity gauge
And Pluralsight gets a shout out!

This was really fun. Thanks, Craig!

Blackberry Finally has the Same Browser Capabilities as iPhone and Android

jim-wilson — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 16:39:00 GMT

We've known for sometime that RIM was planning to switch from their proprietary browser to a WebKit-based browser ... we just didn't know quite when...

... looks like that time has arrived with RIM revealing the new Torch yesterday (Tuesday, 03-August-2010).

If you're not familiar with WebKit, it's the Open Source browser on which the iPhone browser, Android browser, Desktop Safari browser, and to some degree Chrome browser are all based. It's an incredibly powerful browser.

IMHO, the inclusion of WebKit on iPhone and Android was a real game-changer for mobile web content ...

... Webkit on devices finally made building high-end browser-based applications for devices practical.

If you've done much mobile web development, you know that historically the Blackberry browser has been painfully under powered with hugely varied capabilities across different Blackberry models; this made building any significant client-side capabilities into web content targeting Blackberry devices extremely painful and, in many cases, impractical to even try...

... those days are finally beginning to move behind us.

Starting with the Torch and presumably with all future Blackberry devices, the Blackberry browser will now be on par with iPhone and Android ... so mobile web content that you create for iPhone and/or Android will work on the new BlackBerry Torch as well. All the rich JavaScript and DOM support are all there now.

The biggest issue from a web development standpoint is the extremely low resolution of the Torch's screen. Where the Motorola Droid has 800x480 resolution, and the iPhone 4 has an amazing 960x640, the Torch has only 480x360.

That said, having to do the work to add support for a low-resolution screen is a small price to pay to be able to now build rich, client-side scripted mobile web content that runs on a Blackberry device.

This is a good day for mobile app development. :-)

If you're interested in getting overall info on the Torch, here's a positive article about the Torch and here's a not-so-positive article about the Torch.

Google Android Out Sells iPhone!!

jim-wilson — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 19:15:00 GMT

According to the Washington Post ...

... more Android phones were sold in Q2-2010 than iPhones.

Of course, one quarter does not a trend make but this is absolutely amazing ... especially if you think about the fact that Android only became a first-tier platform in January of this year (2010) with the release of the Motorola Droid and Android 2.x; ultimately it means that Android overtook iPhone in less than 6 months.

Both iPhone and Droid are excellent platforms; my bet is that this battle is far from over and that we'll see the two platforms jockey back-and-forth for the lead over the next several quarters

As end-users and developers, this is all good news for us...

With two highly-innovative, well-funded powerhouses like Apple and Google battling to out-perform one another, I think we can count on seeing some great devices and fantastic innovation in the smartphone world for years to come.

For more info, you can find the Washington Post article here.

New Google Android IDE: App Inventor

jim-wilson — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 17:25:00 GMT

A few weeks ago Google announced a new Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Google Android called App Inventor.

What makes App Inventor so different from most other IDE's is that it's intended for both developers and non-developers. It's built on top of a number of technologies including Open Blocks Java Library and the Kawa Language Framework which is a Framework designed to compile high-level and dynamic languages into Java bytecode.

The IDE represents all programming constructs as visual controls/blocks including, functional blocks of code and platform features such as GPS and the phone. The idea is that one can build entire programs by simply linking the controls/blocks together. The environment supports coding one's own controls/blocks.

We'll have to see how well everything works together but this certainly sounds like a really promising direction and might represent a good mix of making easy-things-easy while still allowing professional software developers to take full advantage of the device platform's capabilities.

App Inventor is currently in beta which is temporarily closed; according to Google they received far more interest than expected in the beta program and are now working to reopen it. You can sign up for the beta here.

If you have a chance to work with App Inventor, I'm interested to hear your experiences and how how you feel about the environment.

Pluralsight Website Update, 7/31/2010

keith-brown — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 16:23:00 GMT

You may have noticed some changes on our website. We made a number of updates last Friday, which I’ll summarize in this post.

We’ve been advertising the new Ultimate subscription, which gives you three vouchers for virtual classroom training. It’s now live, and you can purchase it on our website, or upgrade to it if you already have a subscription.

We’ve received a lot of feedback from our customers, which we take to heart. As a result, we’ve simplified the structure of our On-Demand! content so it’s easier to navigate and find what you are looking for. We’ve broken up several of our larger courses into smaller, more focused courses. This makes the content in those courses more discoverable (before this was done, for example, I didn’t realize we had a module on jQuery, but now it’s much easier to find). We’ve also restructured some of our HOWTO series of videos into courses, which should make them easier to navigate using our course viewers. Please note that we’ve not taken any content away. We’ve simply reorganized it for consistency and ease of navigation.

If you’re wondering where “Tutorials” went, they are still around, they’ve just been incorporated as “Beginner” content in our main course library. Now there’s just one page to visit to list all of our courses and tutorials. Oh, and “Beginner” is one of three levels we’ve added on each of our courses to help you more easily find content appropriate to your level of experience with any given subject.

We’ve recategorized the content a bit so that you’ll get better results when you use the “Browse the library” control and search for technologies (we still need to prune that list down a bit, so bear with us). We’ve also restructured our course listing page, categorizing courses so that they are easier to find. We’ve got a brand new search engine in the works that will only search content in the On-Demand! library, and I expect to see that going live either this week or next, so watch for the “search” box to reappear soon and be a *lot* more useful to you.

Another cool feature we’ve added is progress checkmarks. From now on, a checkmark will show up in the course table of contents once you watch a clip. And when you’ve watched all of the clips in a module, a checkmark will show up next to that module so that you can track your overall progress. Our Silverlight player shows these checkmarks next to clip titles as well. Keep in mind that these won’t show up immediately when you click on a clip to start watching it, but the next time you refresh the table of contents page or launch the player, you’ll see that they are updated. We plan on adding some script to hasten their appearance in the future. [EDIT: 8/16/2010 - I've run a script to scrape though our logs and add checkmarks to all user accounts for all content you've watched in the past. Hope this helps!]

We hope you like the new structure and look of the library. Our goal with all of this work is to make it easier for you to navigate and digest our growing library of content. Thanks go out to those of you who took the time to share feedback with us. Keep it coming!

Pluralcast 21 – Extending Visual Studio 2010 with Kate Gregory

david-starr — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 03:41:00 GMT

Listen Now!

Kate Gregory has probably forgotten more coding tricks than I have ever learned. That means that she likes her Visual Studio with meat and potatoes. With the new extensibility model in Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio can now be the primary source or protein in your IDE diet. In this episode Kate tells us how to add a little hot sauce using Visual Studio extensions.

Kate is in her fourth decade of being paid to program. Her firm, Gregory Consulting Limited, is based in rural Ontario and helps clients adopt new technologies and adjust to the changing business environment. Current work makes heavy use of .NET and Visual C++ along with SharePoint and both web and client development, especially for Windows 7. Managing, mentoring, technical writing, and technical speaking occupy much of her time, but she still writes code every week.

Kate is the author of over a dozen books and speaks at DevTeach, TechEd (USA, Europe, Africa), and TechDays, among others. Kate is a C++ MVP, a founding sponsor of the Toronto .NET Users Group, the founder of the East of Toronto .NET Users group, a member of the INETA speakers bureau, and a member of adjunct faculty at Trent University in Peterborough. Since January 2002 she has been Microsoft Regional Director for Toronto and since January 2004 she has been awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional designation for Visual C++. In June 2005 she won the Regional Director of the year award.

Show Links

My MSDN webcasts on VB, C# and Smart Clients (a blast from the past, 2004-2006)

joe-hummel — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 21:15:00 GMT

Back in 2004, I did a series of webcasts on VB and C# programming helping focus move from VB6, C++ or Java over to .NET:

Modern Software Development in .NET using Visual Basic
Modern Software Development in .NET and C#

[ Fritz Onion, also of Pluralsight, did a very popular series of webcasts on ASP.NET. ] In 2005-2006, I also did a language-neutral series on Smart Clients, what I called

The Architecture of Modern Desktop Applications in .NET

5+ years later, I'm flattered to still get an occasional request for the supporting PPT and source code. These dropped off the web a while back, but are now available online for anyone who wants them. The materials are getting dated, but perhaps they are still helpful to some. Cheers!

VS2010 deploy web project with nightly build

fritz-onion — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 13:06:00 GMT

In my Pluralsight Webcast on Web deployment in VS2010 last week there was a question about how to integrate the new Web deployment features of VS2010 into a nightly build (for testing on a staging server, for example). It turns out it's pretty straight forward, once you have your Web solution set up, you can add it to a build definition and have the deploy occur every time the build is fired.

The key to integrating a Web deployment is to point it to your Web solution (under items to build), and under Advanced add the following commands in the MSBuild Arguments:

/p:DeployOnBuild=True /p:Configuration=Stage

The DeployOnBuild flag will run the deployment script (including the config file merging and all) when the build is complete. The Configuration setting is what configuration you want to build (the defaults are Debug and Release, but it often makes sense to add new ones like Stage for scenarios like this, especially when it comes to configuration file modifications with XDT).

There's a presentation by Vishal Joshi from PDC09 on Web Deployment that walks through this process - look around minute 26 of this video:
http://www.microsoftpdc.com/2009/FT56

I'm back --- and Microsoft has released HPC Server 2008 R2 (aka "V3")

joe-hummel — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 21:55:00 GMT

Hello all, I'm back from my 2-month sailing adventure, where I was lucky enough to sail up the East Coast of the USA, and then across the Atlantic to Ireland and eventually the UK. I have some pictures on my facebook page, eventually I'll get them up on the web for anyone interested. I'm happy to be back home and adjusting to life on land.

On the technology front, last week Microsoft quietly released the next version ("V3") of their HPC Server product, officially called "HPC Server 2008 R2" (in case you didn't know, the naming convention refers to the underlying operating system on which the HPC Pack must be installed). The next release adds a number of news features to the product, including:

improved support for HPC-based, service-oriented workloads, including fire-and-forget
integration with Excel 2010 for HPC-based spreadsheet execution
support for cycle-stealing from Windows 7 workstations
MPI and SOA debuggers (plugins for VS 2008, builtin to VS 2010)
Improved IT functionality (deployment, diagnostics, reporting, failover)

You can read more about it here, and download evaluation versions of the base OS (HPC Server 2008 R2 HPC Edition) and HPC Pack (HPC Pack 2008 R2). Developers will also want to download the HPC Pack 2008 R2 SDK, as well as the MS-MPI redistributable. As for me, I'll be installing the RTM bits shortly, and will start to report on the new feature set as well as develop new curricular materials for our training efforts.

Hope everyone is well!

Pluralcast 20 : Technical Community and Geek Give with Steve Andrews

david-starr — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 12:51:40 GMT

Listen Now! [34:20]

Steve Andrews is all about community and helps us understand what it really means to be a part of the technical developer meatspace. Steve has gone beyond the occasional Code Camp and has actually presented talks at 52 community events in one year. Also, Steve is the founder of Geek Give, an occasional community of geeks working with Habitat for Humanity to help make the world a better place. And Steve happens to be on the road at the moment, making his way across the U.S. and keeping us all posted at The Geek Road Trip. Bottom line: What a great visit and great story.

Bio: Steve Andrews is an independent consultant, INETA speaker, and Microsoft MVP for Visual Studio ALM. He has been working in technology for over ten years focusing on custom application development and Application Lifecycle Management. Steve is also Microsoft and IBM certified and a community fanatic having led sessions at nearly 100 community events across North America. When he's not developing software solutions or engaging with the community about software technology, Steve is a closet singer and songwriter and plays the guitar and keys. Occasionally, Steve even gets to sleep. Occasionally.

Steve’s Links:

Pluralcast 19 : OData with Matt Milner

david-starr — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 21:50:00 GMT

Listen to this Episode [45:12]

What’s all this OData talk? Find out in this episode with Matt Milner, who helps us understand this new way of publishing and consuming data on the web. Matt also tells us about a project he recently did for Pluralsight in which he published his first “real” OData feed.

Matt Milner

Matt is a member of the technical staff at Pluralsight, where he focuses on connected systems technologies (WCF, Windows WF, BizTalk, "Dublin" and the Azure Services Platform). Matt is also an independent consultant specializing in Microsoft .NET application design and development. As a writer Matt has contributed to several journals and magazines including MSDN Magazine where he currently authors the workflow content for the Foundations column. Matt regularly shares his love of technology by speaking at local, regional and international conferences such as Tech Ed. Microsoft has recognized Matt as an MVP for his community contributions around connected systems technology.

Show Links

SoCal Code Camp

keith-brown — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 19:26:59 GMT

It was great meeting all of you at the camp! Thanks for coming to my talk, “Get a Whiff of WIF”. The slides and demos can be found here. If you attended the camp, don’t forget to activate your free 7-day subscription to Pluralsight On-Demand! You’ll be able to see *all* of our courses without restriction!

Enjoy!

Two helpful updates for Windows Server AppFabric

matt-milner — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 21:08:20 GMT

From Damir Dobric (http://developers.de/blogs/damir_dobric):

Patch to fix an issue where autostart services start in the wrong application pool:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/983484

This only applies to Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 as IIS 7.5 is the only supported platform for autostart in a service.

Patch to fix issues where the IIS Manager or PowerShell cmdlets fail due to schema issues in IIS configuration files.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/980423

There are a number of different error messages that result from this core issue. In addition to this patch, you should already have installed the hotfix described in the following article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970773

Pluralcast 18 : BDD in .NET with StoryQ

david-starr — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 18:39:00 GMT

Listen to this episode! [31:03]

This episode is a visit with Rob Fonseca-Ensor, the HCIC (Head Craftsman in Charge) of StoryQ, a BDD testing framework for .NET. I used StoryQ in this talk at TechEd 2010 and have used it in production for awhile now. I really like this framework as a vehicle for helping get minds wrapped around the concepts of BDD and for including business folks in our specification discussions.

Rob shares the genesis of the tool and how it works, along with some great nuggets on BDD along the way.

Rob Fonseca-Ensor

Rob Fonseca-Ensor is a New Zealander living in London, working as a .NET consultant for Infusion Development. Founder of the nascent Canary Wharf .Net User Group, Rob has a keen interest in all things agile.

Rob’s Links

Get StoryQ
FLIT
Rob’s blog
Todd’s blog (re: the test automation pyramid)

Interested in web services interoperability with WCF?

matt-milner — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 16:38:38 GMT

Then go take this survey and let Microsoft feel your pain! Not sure anyone will get zapped by their chair when you send feedback, but the team is actively looking into how to make the interop story better, so be sure to get your voice heard. Oh, and it’s a short survey so not a huge time commitment.

http://mymfe.microsoft.com/Feedback.aspx?formID=283

Custom web faults with System.ServiceModel.Web 3.x

matt-milner — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 21:04:14 GMT

A former student approached me with a problem related to the Web programming model using WCF in .NET 3.5. In short, he was using a custom IErrorHandler to create a custom fault message, but the client was always receiving a generic error. Even more of a problem was that the custom error was an HTML formatted message, despite having set the response format on the service to JSON. This caused big problems for the AJAX client trying to reason over that response. I knew that WCF REST Starter Kit and WCF 4 both allowed for custom error messages, so I did some digging to see what might be at the root of the problem. It turns out that the WebHttpBehavior inserts its own IErrorHandler and it was getting in the way of the custom handler he was adding. After pointing this out to Dave, he quickly realized he could create a class that derived from the WebHttpBehavior and override the AddServerErrorHandlers to insert his own error handler. He also created the requisite BehaviorExtensionElement so the new endpoint behavior could be added in the configuration file.

public class JsonWebHttpBehavior : WebHttpBehavior
    {
        protected override void AddServerErrorHandlers(ServiceEndpoint endpoint,
        System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.EndpointDispatcher endpointDispatcher)
        {
            endpointDispatcher.DispatchRuntime.ChannelDispatcher.ErrorHandlers.Add(
               new JsonErrorHandler(endpointDispatcher.DispatchRuntime.ChannelDispatcher.IncludeExceptionDetailInFaults));
        }
    }

    public class JsonWebHttpElement : BehaviorExtensionElement
    {
        protected override object CreateBehavior()
        {
            return new JsonWebHttpBehavior();
        }

        public override Type BehaviorType
        {
            get { return typeof(JsonWebHttpBehavior); }
        }
    }

The job of the custom error handler is to create a custom fault class that provides data back to the calling application. This solution nicely takes into consideration the IncludeExceptionDetailsInFaults property to correctly send the details only when configured to do so. In this case, the status code is always set to 500 to trigger the correct error handling in the client library, but you could also modify this to send more specific HTTP status codes depending on the error message caught on the server.

[DataContract]
    public class JsonFault
    {
        [DataMember]
        public string ExceptionType;

        [DataMember]
        public string Message;

        [DataMember]
        public string StackTrace;
    }

    public class JsonErrorHandler : IErrorHandler
    {
        public JsonErrorHandler(bool includeExceptionDetailInFaults)
        {
            this.includeExceptionDetailInFaults = includeExceptionDetailInFaults;
        }

        public bool HandleError(Exception error)
        {
            return false;
        }

        public void ProvideFault(Exception error,
            System.ServiceModel.Channels.MessageVersion version,
            ref System.ServiceModel.Channels.Message fault)
        {
            JsonFault jsonFault;
            if (includeExceptionDetailInFaults)
            {
                jsonFault = new JsonFault
                {
                    ExceptionType = error.GetType().FullName,
                    Message = error.Message,
                    StackTrace = error.StackTrace
                };
            }
            else
            {
                jsonFault = new JsonFault
                {
                    ExceptionType = typeof(System.Exception).FullName,
                    Message =
                        "An error occurred on the server. See server logs for details.",
                    StackTrace = null
                };
            }

            DataContractJsonSerializer serializer =
                new DataContractJsonSerializer(typeof(JsonFault));

            fault = Message.CreateMessage(version, null, jsonFault, serializer);
            fault.Properties.Add(WebBodyFormatMessageProperty.Name,
                new WebBodyFormatMessageProperty(WebContentFormat.Json));
            WebOperationContext.Current.OutgoingResponse.ContentType = "application/json";
            WebOperationContext.Current.OutgoingResponse.StatusCode =
                System.Net.HttpStatusCode.InternalServerError;
        }

        private bool includeExceptionDetailInFaults;
    }

You could certainly make modifications to only provide faults for certain types of exceptions (which is what .NET 4 does) log information in the HandleError method, etc. Many thanks to Dave Grundgeiger for the inspiration to look into this and the final solution which he designed and allowed me to share here.